Re-reading Wampum: The Penn Treaty Belt and Indeterminate Iconographies

It is late 2022, and I am standing in one of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA)’s recently reinstalled galleries of early American art (fig. 1). A case directly before me displays the famous Penn Treaty Belt (fig. 2), a splendid stretch of woven wampum that depicts two figures against a field of white consisting of hundreds of precisely worked fragments of whelk shells. Traditionally, the belt is associated with the celebrated 1682 meeting between the Indigenous Lenape, or Delaware, Indians, and William Penn, the proprietor of Pennsylvania, beneath an elm at Shackamaxon near Philadelphia. In fact, however, there is no conclusive proof that such a meeting ever took place, and there is much, too, that we do not know about the belt; its maker, date of manufacture, and early provenance all remain unclear.2 All this uncertainty helps explain the tentative language of the museum placard that accompanies the belt. “Perhaps,” it reads, “the maker of the belt intended the linked hands of the two figures—the taller Lenape and the smaller European—to commemorate a moment of peaceful coexistence.”